WHAT IS BURDEN COLLECTIVE?
Burden Collective is a multimedia, educational, and creative collective which was created to provide disabled artists with technical, writing, and exhibition support. The collective puts disability first, as our means of uniting other identities deemed a “burden” on society.
Disability has been overlooked as the first target of dehumanising and eugenicist campaigns throughout history, setting the precedent for sterilization, institutionalisation and surveillance of further “othered” groups. We are committed to weaving disability justice narratives with those of trans, immigrant and racialized people, who make up a majority of our members.
The name Burden is a deliberate, subversive acknowledgment of the cultural fear of disability and the extra labor that institutions, and society at large, associate with it. Too often, disabled artists are framed as costly or complicated, even while we take on the majority of the labor ourselves to ensure equitable participation. By calling ourselves the Burden Collective, we flip this narrative: we make visible the weight of structural inaccessibility, while also claiming the ingenuity, creativity, and care practices that marginalized people have long used to survive within these conditions.
WHAT WE DO
We bring together artists working across robotics, textiles, performance, science communication, and new media to show how care, collaboration, and community infrastructures generate new artistic forms. As an educational and creative collective, we not only produce multimedia work but also make practical community resources that support other disabled artists. We recognize that the most pressing barriers facing disabled artists in “Montreal” are not solved by simple accommodations like ramps or captions; we aim to practically address the deeper intersecting layers of unsafe housing, inaccessible transit, delayed equipment funding, income constraints, and unrecognized care needs that prevent many from fully participating in cultural life.
Rather than treating access as a checklist, the Burden Collective understands it as the foundation for making work that is expansive, relational, and deeply relevant to our time. By embedding access into every stage of our process and by leaving behind tools for others, we aim to shift how residencies and cultural institutions understand their role in supporting disabled artists.
HOW TO LEARN MORE
Burden Collective is in its very early stages. We hope to do formal call-outs for new members and to access support soon. But, we want to hear from you now: do you feel like you may like to join? Have you faced a barrier to creation or exhibition that we should address? Want to share something you think we’d like? All are welcome, via the form below!
Emery Vanderburgh 